Slashdot mentioned a study at Vanderbilt and Yale that shows that people have momentary “blindness” after they see a violent or otherwise emotionally laden image. They even have a handy dandy demo app. I felt like I could almost see the target image on the test that was supposed to be the toughest. The only thing I noticed about the study, though, seems like the variations seems small… 90% to 70% isn’t as much as I would expect. Their test probably had a wider variation of timing.

I wonder if it’s blindness in a real sense (the inability to see momentarily) or if it’s more a question of attention. I only skimmed the article and plan on going back to read it, but the article implies that it’s an attention thing: you just can’t process everything your eyes see, especially if your eyes and brain a busy with what you just saw. I swear that I could sense that I was trying to make out details of the disturbing image to try to understand what it was that I was seeing rather than being emotionally impacted by it…

ESPN.com’s sister site ABCNews.com has a story about this study as well.